Make the Punishment Fit the Cyber-Crime

LAST week, a New Jersey jury convicted Dharun Ravi of invasion of privacy, and for good reason. Mr. Ravi activated the webcam in his room at Rutgers so he could watch his roommate, Tyler Clementi, meet up with a male date. Worse, he broadcast his plans to do it again over Twitter, inviting his friends to watch. That kind of spying should be out of bounds on a college campus.

What’s out of whack about Mr. Ravi’s case is the harsh punishment he now faces: as much as 10 years in prison, for a 20-year-old who’d never been in legal trouble before.

Mr. Ravi could go away for years because, on top of spying, he was convicted of a hate crime: bias intimidation, a conviction probably influenced by Mr. Clementi’s subsequent suicide. According to New Jersey’s civil rights law, you are subject to a much higher penalty if the jury finds that you committed one of a broad range of underlying offenses for the purpose of targeting someone because of his race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

The idea of shielding vulnerable groups is well intentioned. But with the nation on high alert over bullying — especially when it intersects with computer technology and the Internet — these civil rights statutes are being stretched to go after teenagers who acted meanly, but not violently. This isn’t what civil rights laws should be for.

New Jersey passed one of the country’s first hate crimes statutes in 1981, outlawing the burning of crosses or placing of swastikas to terrorize and threaten violence. In 1990, the legislature added extra prison time for racial, ethnic or religious prejudice. “From now on hate crimes will be serious crimes,” Governor Jim Florio said upon signing the bill, citing “a phone call in the middle of the night or vandalism that leaves hateful symbols in its wake or racial slurs.”

In New Jersey, cases with bias intimidation charges have typically included an underlying offense of significant violence. People have been found guilty under the civil rights law for throwing punches while yelling a racial epithet, for beating a man with a metal rod while cursing him for being from India, and for threatening to shoot a driver, employing a racial slur and then tailgating him for miles. These are cases in which prejudice twists into ugly and serious harm.

Teenagers have also previously been charged with bias intimidation. One boy was convicted for being the ringleader of a bunch of children who ganged up on a girl, calling her a lesbian. Another teenager got in trouble for shoving a boy, using a racial slur and threatening to hang him from a tree. But as juveniles, the kids in these cases were spared harsh punishment. The boy who did the shoving was ordered to spend 10 days in juvenile detention and read the book “Black Like Me.”

Mr. Ravi was 18 years old when he spied on Mr. Clementi, legally an adult, but he did things that reek of immature homophobia. He told a friend he wanted to “keep the gays away,” and when he set up his webcam a second time, his tweets and texts showed that he was giddily trading on Mr. Clementi’s homosexuality to get attention.

Was Mr. Clementi intimidated by Mr. Ravi’s spying? The record is mixed, but inflected by Mr. Clementi’s suicide a day after the second spying incident. Though it’s not clear how much Mr. Ravi’s actions influenced his roommate’s decision to take his own life, the proximity in time is chilling.

Given how broadly the civil rights laws are written, it’s not surprising that prosecutors turned to them to ramp up the charges against Mr. Ravi, especially because this normally increases the pressure on a defendant to plead guilty. The state then made Mr. Ravi a fair offer: community service in exchange for admitting to invading Mr. Clementi’s privacy. It was Mr. Ravi’s mistake not to take it.

And yet, if Mr. Ravi spends years in prison, his case will set an alarming precedent of disproportional punishment. The spying he did was criminal, but it was also, as his lawyer put it, “stupid kid” behavior.

Mr. Ravi isn’t the only person caught in this legal snare. After bullying was blamed for the suicide two years ago of Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old in South Hadley, Mass., prosecutors criminally charged six teenagers. That time, the district attorney used the state’s civil rights laws to directly blame five of them for Phoebe’s death. Like Mr. Ravi, they faced a sentence of up to 10 years. Never mind that the Massachusetts law had previously been used against violent racist thugs. Because it was broadly written, like New Jersey’s, prosecutors could seize upon the law because it “sent a message” about bullying, as one of them later said.

The Massachusetts cases ended with a whimper: After the district attorney who brought the civil rights charges left office, her successor dropped the charges against one teenager and wisely resolved the cases against the other five, who admitted some wrongdoing, with probation and community service.

Mr. Ravi, of course, will not be so lucky. States like New Jersey and Massachusetts should narrow their civil rights laws so that he’s not the first of many stupid but nonviolent young people who pay a too-heavy price for our fears about how kids use technology to be cruel.

Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate, is writing a book about bullying called “Sticks and Stones.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 20, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Make the Punishment Fit the Cyber-Crime. Today's Paper|Subscribe